One hour later, five time zones west.
Splashes of fire flashed overhead in a Technicolor arc, painting the night like neon graffiti, illuminating the bay and the dozens of luxury motor yachts jockeying for position along the floating dock. A throbbing, electric beat from the nearby outdoor “arena”—a massive, open pit, jammed with nearly 100,000 people, sprawled out in front of a huge, raised stage—reverberated through the air, so loud that, even from the dock behind the mainstage, each note threatened to crack the very air.
Now this is how you make an entrance, Tyler thought to himself as he stepped off the edge of a London gray, eighty-eight-foot Riva motor yacht and onto the dock. The humid breeze pulled at his white slacks and shirt, but he had no trouble navigating the short hop from the water onto land; the excessively tall girl in terrifyingly high heels next to him, holding on to his hand for balance, had it a little more difficult. When she too touched down, she let out what could only be described as a squeal, and Tyler laughed, because, given the moment, it was as appropriate a sound as any.
Tyler steadied the girl on the dock and started forward, toward the music. Along with his slacks and shirt, his shoes were also white, because it was Miami, it was eighty-five degrees at night, and why the hell not. He had just spent the early part of the afternoon on the super yacht he had just disembarked from, a floating kingdom with tan leather interiors, a wet bar, a hot tub, and the woman next to him. Her name was Tiffany, and she was at least six feet tall in her bare feet, with hair streaked in purple and gold, eyelashes as long as a tarantula’s legs, wearing a bikini top and white jean short shorts. She looked like a model and indeed had walked her fair share of runways. But she was a nursing student by day and could hold her own with any of Tyler’s contemporaries.
Cameron was a few feet ahead of them, already on the dock, also wearing white, parenthesized by a Dutch supermodel with a name neither of them could pronounce and her famous DJ husband, both of whom were decked out in black leather despite the heat.
“Hold up,” Tyler called to his brother, as he himself nearly tripped on one of the wooden slots beneath his feet. “I don’t want to break an ankle before we even get inside.”
The path that snaked out ahead of them toward the VIP entrance to the “arena” was really more runway than dock; held up by bright blue pontoons floating in the bay, it circumnavigated the waterfront, normally a jag of prime Miami real estate that bordered the Financial District, a good twenty-minute drive over the bridge from South Beach, where everyone who could afford to was actually staying—and ended at that covered entrance, which would assumedly spit them out so close to the stage that their ears would bleed.
Each step was a preview of the shattering volume and incredible energy that Tyler knew was coming; he could already see the top part of the stage, the hollowed-out half shell rising up beneath the fireworks engulfing the sky, a honey-combed, crisscrossed, metal monstrosity bristling with lights and speakers. He wasn’t a huge EDM fan; he couldn’t identify the DJ who was already onstage by the pounding music so loud now that it threatened to knock him right into the bay, but it was assuredly someone famous. He’d seen the lineup on the boat ride over: Calvin Harris, David Guetta, Deadmau5, Tiësto, Avicci, Swedish House Mafia—the list went on and on, every name more famous in the EDM community than the last.
“Welcome to Ultra,” the Dutch model next to Cameron said over her shoulder as Tyler finally caught up. “Even if you broke your ankle the music would keep you dancing until five A.M.”
It was the kind of thing someone married to a DJ might say, but Tyler doubted he would be dancing—or awake—at five in the morning. It had been a long month already, but Ultra was definitely something he and Cameron had to see. They had to be in Miami that second week of March anyway, part of a seven-city road trip down the southeastern seaboard of the country, pushing Bitcoin, and there seemed to be no better way to cap off two days of meetings in suits than a stop at one of the premier music festivals in the world.
Though tiring, the meetings had been extremely promising. In the past few months since they’d made their huge investment in the virtual currency, bitcoin had steadily risen in price and was hovering around the $40 mark. That meant their growing investment was now worth close to $40 million, and the entire market cap of bitcoin had gone from around $100 million in value to close to half a billion.
It wasn’t hard to catch people’s interest when talking about Bitcoin. And Tyler and his brother didn’t have trouble getting just about anyone to meet with them; people were willing to sit down with them out of curiosity alone. But that didn’t mean the businessmen they met with were willing or ready to invest in bitcoin. Bitcoin still seemed too speculative for people who worked at conventional banks and funds. Even managers of hedge funds, the types who had no problem plunking down tens of millions of dollars on modern art, odd commodities, gold, or sketchy mining outfits in undeveloped third world countries were afraid of a virtual currency created by a mysterious computer programmer.
Still, Tyler saw the cavalcade of meetings as a success. His immediate goal wasn’t to convince anyone to buy bitcoin, it was to simply educate them on the new virtual currency, to act as an ambassador to what he believed, more and more, was the future of money. Success right now meant getting the conversation started and planting the seeds of the idea of decentralized virtual currency in the minds of some of the most influential business leaders in the world.
Still, it was a grueling schedule of meetings, and this was the perfect change of scenery. Ultra, in its fifteenth year in Miami, had grown from a few thousand attendees in 1999 to over 300,000 rabid electronic music fans. All in all, the Ultra stages, in combination with parties thrown all through the day and night at pretty much every hotel pool and club between downtown and South Beach, made for one big outdoor rave. The Delano, where Tyler and Cameron had booked a penthouse suite, was an art deco hotel located on Collins Avenue and was famous for its celebrity guests. Everything was white, from the minimalist furniture, to the walls, to the light fixtures. A wave of white, washing all the way from the hotel lobby, past the giant chessboard on the terraced lawn, to the candles in the candelabra sitting on a metal table that stood in the shallow end of the pool. The hotel had DJs stationed by the breakfast buffet, the pool, and the beach. Whether he liked it or not, Tyler knew he would be hearing trance-like, rising and falling electric tones in his sleep for days to come.
Their group reached the VIP entrance right behind a small crowd that had come off of one of the similar yachts crowding the waterway. Tyler recognized a few of the faces: Snoop Dogg, Michael Bay, Rob Gronkowski. All of a sudden, flashy plastic wristbands were slapped on their wrists, and they were whisked through the entrance—led through a break in the crowd—more of a tunnel weaving past arms and legs and bodies held back by steel barricades and security guards—toward a blocked-off area of tables for celebrities and people who were willing to spend like celebrities. Even though they were nonpaying guests, Tyler couldn’t help but wince at the fact that these tables went for more than $20,000 for the night, and that most of the groups would be spending five times that on alcohol, served by women in skin-baring uniforms shuttling back and forth from a private bar tucked right next to the stage.
As they entered the table area, Tyler felt the ground shaking beneath his feet. The beat had gotten so loud that it was hard even to think, but that didn’t stop him from noticing a smaller vibration in the pocket of his shirt. He realized it was his smartphone going off. As he reached for it, he saw that Cameron had also paused at the edge of the VIP area and was also reaching for his own smartphone. The fact that they were both getting blown-up messages at the same time—6:00 P.M. on a Saturday evening—meant that something important was going on.
Cameron got to his phone first. Sticking white earbuds in both ears, he tried to listen to a voice mail amid the ambient wall of sound, but he quickly gave up, looking at his screen instead. Tyler went straight to his own screen and saw text after text. Most were from the people they had met in the Bitcoin world, including Charlie, a variety of bankers they’d given presentations to in the past few days, and even their father. All the texts centered on the same topic, and many ended in multiple exclamation marks.
As Tyler read, then googled, then read more, the immense arena, the eardrum-shattering music, and the beautiful people receded around him. He could have been standing alone on a beach. All he could think about was what he was reading. He looked up and locked eyes with Cameron.
Cyprus.
At that moment, they both knew that this little island country on the other side of the world, which many of the three hundred thousand dancing people around them had never even heard of, was about to change everything.
Cyprus, according to some, was named for its rich natural veins of copper. Copper—once used for money by the Romans, still used by the United States in its pennies—was of little comfort to them now. Its banks had been swimming naked, amassing tons of bad debt, and the tide had just gone out.
The EU finance ministers—the central authority of this system—had agreed to help, but under one condition. The EU would lend Cyprus money, but only if Cyprus agreed to chip in itself by taking money directly from its people—a “bailout” predicated on a “bail-in.” With the stroke of a pen, Cypriot banks had been ordered to confiscate all customer bank deposits in excess of €100,000 and send them to the Bank of Cyprus. In other words, if you held €500,000 in a Cyprus bank, you would lose €400,000 and be left with €100,000. And just like that, the government of Cyprus had agreed to pass the buck to its citizens—almost none of whom had anything to do with making the decisions that had gotten the country into financial ruin in the first place.
It wasn’t the sheer size of the theft perpetrated by the Cyprian government against its people that had sent shock waves through the world—it was the fact that something like that could even happen. It was the exact thing that people like Voorhees and Ver prophesized: the capricious whim of government intervention.
The girl with the tarantula eyelashes leaned close to Tyler, glitter on her cheeks flashing from the lights of the stage and the glow of his phone.
“What’s going on?” she asked, lips almost touching his ear so that he could hear over the music.
Tyler waved Cameron over.
“A whole country just got robbed by their own government,” he shouted.
“That can happen?” the girl asked.
“It just did, in the EU,” Tyler said. “And it can happen here too.”
He and his brother were both thinking the same thing. What could happen in Cyprus could conceivably happen here. The U.S. government stepped in during economic crises all the time. Less than five years earlier, the United States had used billions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street banks during the 2008 financial crisis. During the Great Depression the government had prohibited U.S. citizens from owning gold: in 1933, President Roosevelt had signed executive order 6102, requiring citizens to turn in their gold for cash. It wasn’t until 1975, when President Ford repealed this order, that it was again legal for Americans to own gold that wasn’t jewelry or coins. And all bank deposits were only insured to the tune of $250,000.
“More than twenty thousand account holders at Laika, the second largest bank in Cyprus, are going to have half of their savings taken away,” Tyler said. “The Bank of Cyprus, the largest bank, is going to take almost fifty percent of all deposits over a hundred thousand.”
“They’re calling it a tax, or levy,” Cameron said. “They’re closing all the banks to keep it from turning into a bank run.”
“Look at this picture,” Tyler said. “This is a mob outside one of the banks. A bunch of people got hold of a bulldozer. It looks like they’re going to try to get inside.”
“Nobody is going to feel safe keeping their money in an EU bank after this. No one is going to feel safe keeping money in any bank, period.”
Tyler looked at him. The entire arena seemed to lurch under his feet as the DJ on the stage hit keys on his computer, launching off an artillery battalion of synthetic drumbeats.
If this could happen in an EU country, what prevented it from happening anywhere else? This was precedent.
Tyler was too young to remember the savings and loan crisis in 1987, but they had lived through the dot-com bubble in 1999, and the recent credit crisis, just four years earlier, in 2008. He believed that what was happening in Cyprus was exactly the sort of financial trauma that would open people’s eyes to just how safe their money actually was—or wasn’t.
Cyprus would scare the world straight. It was exactly what Bitcoin needed—the catalyst that would propel Bitcoin into the world’s consciousness.
“If you don’t keep your money in a bank, where can you keep it?” Tiffany asked.
Tyler felt his pulse rising in tune with the music, level after level after level, until it was a thunder in his ears.
Why keep any money, when there was something much better that was now available? Something that was about to get much easier to promote.
And much, much more valuable.